I promised a number of brief news items the other day after a week or two with a whole bunch of stuff happening. After a bit more time for further thought and updating, some of what follows is not that brief but I do believe it is all worthy of our attention. So, enjoy! – or endure: either way, it’s rather compelling stuff.

ABUSE ENQUIRY: THIRD TIME LUCKY?

The British government’s ill-fated attempt to set up an over-arching enquiry into all sorts of sex abuse going right back (well almost) to the biblical Lot* drunkenly shagging his daughter, saw the appointment of its third chair, the first two having fallen victim to victimisation by historic “victims”.

At least the appointee, New Zealand High Court judge Lowell Goddard cannot reasonably be accused of being too close and cosy with the British legal and political Establishment. Anyone acceptable to the victim lobby must of course be viscerally anti-paedophile, so this quote from her in a Guardian profile comes as no surprise: “There have been very few people throughout my career that I have not been able to relate to in any way. These were the paedophiles and the psychopaths. Usually I could relate in a professional way to anyone, no matter what they’d done.” On the other hand, the Guardian tells us, she kept the name of a convicted paedophile secret in a case where presumably “the victims” (and the media) wanted it otherwise.

Ben Emmerson QC welcomed Goddard’s appointment, saying she is “one of the most respected and experienced judges in the Commonwealth” and much more, in fact pretty much the greatest thing since sliced abusers. Or was he thinking of sliced victims? As legal counsel to the enquiry, Emmerson firmly put Sharon Evans, one of the victims’ lobby representatives on the enquiry panel, in her place, saying she could not tell the difference between truth and error and had “done no service to the survivor community”.

That took balls. Emmerson is clearly a man not afraid to speak his mind. He nearly started World War III the other day, calling Vladimir Putin a “common criminal dressed up as a head of state” who ordered the murder of Alexander Litvinenko to stop him exposing Putin’s corrupt “mafia” regime. Emmerson had been representing the former spy’s family at the enquiry into his death by polonium poisoning. Very soon after this, in an incident some see as linked to Emmerson’s insults, Russian bombers were intercepted by the RAF flying provocatively close to British airspace over the English Channel.

I am digressing a bit here, but it gets even more interesting, I promise, so never mind. In another plot turn, Litvinenko had accused Putin of being a paedophile, after mad, bad Vlad publicly lifted up a five-year-old boy’s tee-shirt and kissed him on the stomach. The Daily Mail carried the story, complete with the boys’ name, Nikita Konkin, back in 2006. There is also a photo of the deed on Google images so we can judge for ourselves. Verdict, anyone?

Anyway, back to Judge Lowell Goddard. I asked my friend in New Zealand who blogs as “peterhoo” if he had any lowdown on her. After a bit of digging he came up with some fascinating information totally at odds with Emmerson’s high opinion. As you will see from links on his interesting latest blog, “Still breaking rules, but that’s okay”, a survey of New Zealand judges has given her the lowest rating of the lot: 63rd out of 63. The comment says:

“Low marks across the board. Much criticism of Goddard J’s obsession with self-image, which this judge understands can only be maintained by kowtowing to powerful special interests. Said to be as committed to law as she is at marriage (several times), Goddard is regarded by some as a human rights hypocrite, her judgement disconnected with her diligent efforts to be portrayed as a human rights advocate. “Puppet” came up more than once to describe this judge who is as white as any Irishman yet routinely describes herself as a disadvantaged Maori.”

Ouch! Not sure about that last jab. Yes, she definitely looks quite pale in her photos. Does this firmly establish that she has very little Maori “blood”? I know skin colour depends on lots of genes so a simple recessive gene explanation is presumably not available, but… But I digress again!

* First off, I mistakenly said Abraham. Sorry about that and thanks to Kit Marlowe for correction. See comments below.

“Rotherham Council is an organisation still ‘in denial’ about its total failure to protect 1,400 girls from child sexual exploitation, a devastating government report said. Louise Casey, who was asked to carry out an inspection of the council by the Department for Communities and Local Government, found that staff did not accept the findings of an independent inquiry carried out by Professor Alexis Jay last year.”

Casey’s report may have been right, but what I found most shocking was a report of one of the BBC’s main current affairs programmes, Radio 4’s The World At One. At a time when Rotherham Council was telling the BBC they would need time to digest the report, and that they would issue a statement later, presenter Edward Stourton interviewed Casey. BBC correspondent Michael Buchanan had reported that 70% of council members disputed the findings, especially about the figure of 1,400 victims. “We keep hearing about all these victims, but where are they?” was reportedly a widespread response by council members.

That sounds like a pretty good question to me. Why have very few of these alleged “victims” come forward and said they are victims?

But it didn’t stop Stourton from simply assuming the truth of the Casey report and interpreting the councillors’ response merely as proof of them being “in denial”. Likewise Casey herself, who was given an easy ride by Stourton, said some councillors had “questioned the methodology” of the report, as though that too was proof of their guilt rather than legitimate scepticism.

If even a town’s elected representatives can be gang-raped like this by the national government and the premier national broadcaster, what chance do we have as individual heretics?

COVERING UP THE COVERER UP?

The “very private” funeral of British former home secretary Leon Brittan was reported this week following his death last month. His burial comes amidst persistent rumours that he had done some burying of his own in his time, covering up a dossier of evidence that supposedly incriminated senior politicians in “the sexual abuse of boys in the 1980s”.

I have no idea whether there was any truth in this, but I think we can discount the wildest allegations made against him, the most recent of which have been far more shocking than any cover-up. According to the Daily Mail, Labour MP Tom Watson said Brittan stood accused of “multiple child rape”. The “evidence”, such as it is, comes from an anonymous witness dubbed “Nick”, who claims he was raped “more than a dozen times”. He is quoted as saying Lord Brittan “would treat me like I was not even human”, adding that the peer was “nasty, cruel, sadistic and hateful”.

Other witnesses, who appear to be former rent boys – who would go back time and again to be “raped” by politicians and other VIPs – have even attested to the murder of several boys as part of this scandal, but we are not told about any bodies being found, nor any names of missing persons who might have been the victims.

Another factor that makes me doubt the credibility of these rent-boy witnesses is that one of them, “Darren”, made similarly lurid allegations against my old friends Charles Napier and Peter Righton, accusing them of callous and sadistic abuse. I am absolutely certain these were outright lies.

GARY GLITTER: GUILTY AGAIN

Garry Glitter, 1970s rock star, faces possible life imprisonment after being convicted of “historic” sex offences involving three young girls. His chances of avoiding a long sentence look slim given his earlier convictions for similar offences in Vietnam, and also child porn possession.

In a vintage week for show trials, Glitter was far from alone. Also in the dock was TV weatherman Fred Talbot, facing historic offences involving boys, dating from his earlier career in teaching. This trial almost out-glittered Glitter, as one of the accusers, former Stone Roses frontman Ian Brown, used to be a star himself. A one-time pupil of Talbot’s at Altrincham grammar school, near Manchester, Brown interestingly let slip that Talbot was different from most of the other teachers because he “wasn’t violent”. Will this help Talbot? Nah! Not being properly hard is a sure sign of a nonce!

Any star case would usually be big, but here’s one that might slip under your radar in such an incredible time for such cases: folk-rock singer/songwriter Roy Harper could face a re-trial on five charges of historical sexual abuse involving young girls after a jury failed to reach verdicts. Harper’s influence has been acknowledged by many musicians including Jimmy Page and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin, who named the song “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper” after him.

PROSECUTOR MUTILATES A GOOD CAUSE

Even those of us who feel that male genital mutilation in infancy or childhood is a serious form of abuse would probably agree that female genital mutilation (FGM) is often far worse, especially in its more radical forms. So many of us welcomed the news last year that prosecutions directed against this practice were reportedly in the pipeline in Britain, after decades of official foot-dragging on the issue.

What we did not know is that the first case to reach a conclusion would be an utterly idiotic one to bring, resulting in a rapid and obviously correct jury decision to acquit. There now has to be some suspicion that this crazy case was brought simply in order to undermine public pressure for further prosecutions against FGM, the fear in official circles being that they will serve only to stoke the flames of religious and cultural tension.

The problem is, there is something in it: in France, where there have been many FGM prosecutions, and also attempts to ensure acceptance of French culture by such means as the banning of head-scarves, such tensions are far more strongly pronounced. It is a real dilemma, which Heretic TOC has been meaning for some time to address.

WALTER LEE WILLIAMS

News has reached Heretic TOC of a nightmarish situation in which distinguished anthropologist Walter Lee Williams finds himself in an American prison, having been forced through complicated circumstances to submit to a plea bargain on child sex charges. This is a story I hope to take up in more detail in due course. It is far too complex to be dealt with briefly but readers can catch up with Williams’ extensive work in anthropology and queer activism (“gay rights” doesn’t really hack it) at the links here and here.

“5 WAYS WE MISUNDERSTAND PEDOPHILIA”

A sensational start, with around a million views in the first 24 hours, for a public education article. That ought to be excellent news, but as this is one of those VP efforts, in league with their favoured abuse industry professionals, the word “education” here really needs to come with scare quotes. My view? It’s slick, with eye-catching graphics and user-friendly language. There’s a lot of good information too. In the end it’s just the moralising that sticks in the craw.

BOY KIDNAPPED BY OWN FAMILY

More than any other story I have seen recently, this one captures the craziness of our times. A family staged the kidnapping of their own six-year-old boy, abusing him horribly in the process, to teach him it’s dangerous to be nice to strangers – and thereby neatly demonstrating that paranoid parenting is what should really scare us.

The Rotherham inquiry sounded phony to me, like really bad right-wing propaganda. While I remained skeptical about it, everyone in my atheist circle accepted it as pure truth and that caused me to pull away – once again – from having anything to do with politics. It seems every side is willing to accept any lie as long as it plays nicely to their worldview by demonizing the right set of people (in this case Islam.) Perhaps though I am unwilling to believe it fully due partly to my own pedophilia but at least I remain skeptical rather than swallow whole what’s written in the media.

People will be willing to accept even outrageous lies if it plays to their cultural sensibilities strongly enough. Too many people feel that it’s utterly heartless and cruel to question any allegation about sexual abuse to underagers, because that’s reflexively seen as a slight against all actual victims… both real and manufactured. They believe if there’s any chance such allegations are true – however slight – then they must assume they are true, or they will look like a heel. They know how sensitive the culture in general is about this particular type of abuse, so they see it as an exercise of sheer crassness to ever question it. If any of them do notice the many holes in any given story, they duck into the proverbial corner and keep their mouths shut lest they be assaulted by the hordes of emotionally volatile true believers out there.

There are also numerous victimologists and “professional victims” out there who believe that it’s best to never question the veracity of such claims, because in their eyes it serves the “greater good” of bringing such an important issue to the attention of the public, and seeing someone – anyone – go to jail over such claims. The way these individuals see it, the ends justifies the means: even if a number of innocent people are having their lives destroyed by false allegations, it’s ultimately beneficial if that’s what it takes to ensure that not a single guilty person ever runs the risk of being set free. Railroading many innocent people along with the guilty also gives many government agencies the appearance of “doing something” about what is perceived as a problem of epidemic proportions.

It’s also no surprise to me that your fellow atheists fall for such sentimentality-based lies as much as any religious person. Certain sacrosanct paradigms, such as the conceptions of the Innocent Child and the Exploited Child, have a powerful appeal to anyone born and raised in modern Western culture that transcends sectarian barriers. The media conception of the “pedophile” is a fully secular bogeyman that even die hard dissenters from religious thought fully embrace with a degree of zealotry that rivals the Christian fundamentalists’ fealty to the concept of Christ as Personal Savior. Atheists often claim loyalty to rationalism over and above anything else, but the problem is, emotionally charged issues like this switch off people’s rational/reasoning faculties.

It’s hard to miss a certain amount of eye-shutting on this subject in the gay community. According to Randy Shilts’ The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, the oldest person Milk started a sexual relationship with was about twenty-six and the youngest was sixteen, this being when Milk was thirty-three. Milk was also far from monogamous. We don’t hear a lot about any of this. Alan Turing’s conviction for homosexual acts apparently came about after he reported to the police that his house had been burgled by a nineteen-year-old with whom Turing, then thirty-nine, had had a brief sexual relationship. I’m guessing that won’t be in the new movie. The German poet Stefan George was strongly attracted to fourteen-year-old boys. I once found a website which oxymoronically described this as “love of adolescent men”.

Dea Birkett in writes in this article https://www.ipce.info/ipceweb/Library/97-126_birkett_faces.htm “During my research I met Neil, a gay man now aged 40, who enjoyed having sex with adult men from the age of nine. ‘It seems to be politically correct, even within the gay movement, to be anti-paedophile. But when I ask gay male friends when they first had sex they say, “Oh, ten, 11, 12, with a bloke down the road who was 22.” He was probably a paedophile!’ “

It’s hard to miss a certain amount of eye-shutting on this subject in the gay community. According to Randy Shilts’ The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, the oldest person Milk started a sexual relationship with was about twenty-six and the youngest was sixteen, this being when Milk was thirty-three. Milk was also far from monogamous. We don’t hear a lot about any of this. Alan Turing’s conviction for homosexual acts apparently came about after he reported to the police that his house had been burgled by a nineteen-year-old with whom Turing, then thirty-nine, had had a brief sexual relationship. I’m guessing that won’t be in the new movie. The German poet Stefan George was strongly attracted to fourteen-year-old boys. I once found a website which oxymoronically described this as “love of adolescent men”.

Yes but that was a Long Time Ago. I get the impression that as soon as male homosexual acts were legalised at all (for over 21s in England in 1967) gays were expected to toe the line until the AoC was progressively reduced to 16. Otherwise Jonathan King would have got away with his doings in the 70s.

The gay community over the past three decades has been struggling to deny and reverse the many revolutionary policies and ideas it fought for prior to the 1980s. This includes not only acceptance of attraction to underagers (at least those of the young adolescent variety), but the gerontophilic desire amongst younger people for older individuals, the legitimacy of polyamory, expanded notions of what constitutes the family, and any number of other challenges to the narrow strictures of modern social values and laws. Their mass abandonment for their revolutionary past in favor of seeking assimilation into the existing cultural and political institutions included the strict embracing of monoamory and state sanctioned monogamous partnerships, as well as the establishment of nuclear family units. Many, many homosexuals and bisexuals still do not follow this socially acceptable pattern, of course, but as noted, this isn’t talked about much among the LGBT community these days.

Understood what you were saying up to this point, Dissident: “Many, many homosexuals and bisexuals still do not follow this socially acceptable pattern …” Are you suggesting that many still have a socially unacceptable promiscuous lifestyle, or are you saying that many still openly support the revolutionary policies and ideas it fought for prior to the 1980s, for example, adding a paederasty colour to the LGBT rainbow? If the latter, can you quantify the “many, many”? TIA.

“Many, many homosexuals and bisexuals still do not follow this socially acceptable pattern …” Are you suggesting that many still have a socially unacceptable promiscuous lifestyle, or are you saying that many still openly support the revolutionary policies and ideas it fought for prior to the 1980s, for example, adding a paederasty colour to the LGBT rainbow?

Unfortunately, I meant the former. And I apologize for not making this more clear in the way I worded the sentence. Of course, the majority of people in the gay community who do continue to lead promiscuous and polyamorous lives will do their best to downplay this fact, and if confronted about it, will attempt to placate public expectations by saying something like, “I just haven’t met that ‘one special’ person yet.”

Yes, surveys appear to show that there is widespread sexual compulsion among homosexual men.

83% of homosexual men surveyed estimated they had had sex with 50 or more partners in their lifetime, 43% estimated they had sex with 500 or more partners, and 28% with 1,000 or more partners. 79% of the respondents said that over half of their sexual partners were strangers. 70% said that over half of their sexual partners were people with whom they had sex only once.
Bell and Weinberg “Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women”, New York: Simon and Schuster (1978).

In a study of the sexual profiles of 2,583 older homosexuals, the modal range for number of sexual partners ever was 101–500. In addition, 10.2-15.7% had 501-1000 partners. A further 10.2-15.7% reported having had more than 1000 lifetime sexual partners.
Paul Van de Ven et al., “A Comparative Demographic and Sexual Profile of Older Homosexually Active Men”, Journal of Sex Research 34 (1997).

Compare the above with statistics for paedosexuals, and you will find … oh wait, there were no sexual partners.

By the time their AOC was reduced to 16, it was absolutely not on to mention that much-older men might want sex with sixteen-year-old boys: instead it was framed as a question of equal rights for gay teenagers in same-age relationships. I believe a Stonewall spokesman said it was about “protecting young people” — which is an entirely legitimate point, of course.

Incidentally – in the UK – it appears that the retention of the AoC at 18 (and its increase to 18 for heterosexual relationships) where the older partner is “in a position of authority” (mostly teachers) was done as a sop to parliamentarians still concerned about male teachers leading boys astray.

There is a lot of “quid pro quo” in passing legislation. The banning of uncle/niece sex &c. for no good reason might have been part of this: apparently a horse-breeding lord thought it was a good idea.

“5 Ways We Misunderstand Pedophilia (That Makes it Worse)” – I posted the following comment elsewhere, where the Robert Evans article in CRACKED was flagged:

‘The article should be re-named: 10 Ways We Misunderstand Pedophilia

Extracts with my comments beneath each one:

“All right, how about this: there are enough pedophiles to keep four million child porn websites in business, and enough paying customers to build an international industry worth as much as $20 billion. Ten years ago, the feds shut down a single site that was getting a million hits a month. Throw in the fact that not every pedophile is looking at kiddie porn, and it starts to look like there are way more adults with sexual urges toward children than you’d think.”

“It makes sense that non-offenders would try to find a victimless outlet for their urges. That brings us back to child pornography, but that’s hardly victimless. The subjects of photos/videos are exploited, and paying for the material – or just giving websites traffic – supports the industry that exploits them.”

“But over here, people attracted to kids have to rely on each other for help. They’ve formed an organization called Virtuous Pedophiles. We got in touch with most of our sources through that site – and the professionals we talked to spoke highly of them.”

Umm, this a minority group of paedophiles that by no means represent all paedophiles. The ‘professionals’ no doubt spoke highly of them, because to speak highly of the majority of paedophiles would be tantamount to committing professional suicide. To speak highly of paedophiles who are disgusted by their sexuality, accrues negligible risk to their professional careers.

“Society doesn’t recognize it as an illness … even though science does.”

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) claimed homosexuality was a mental disorder up to the 1960s, when it changed its mind. The APA claimed paedosexuality was a mental disorder up to 2013, when it changed its mind. It has updated its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) stating that paedophiles who desire to have sex with children are no longer classified as having a psychiatric condition.

“Dr. James Cantor is one of the world’s leading scientists on a wildly under-studied subject: the brains of pedophiles.”

But wait a minute, the article opens with the following statement:

“And we are ignorant; pedophilia is almost a total mystery to modern science. We don’t know what causes it, or how to prevent it, or how to cure it (short of a form of castration).”

If paedophilia is such a total mystery, how come the article leans so heavily on the evidence of a “world’s leading scientist” no less, who claims to have found the answer to why a paedophile is a paedophile, due to the paedophile’s brain being different from everyone else’s? This evidence reminds me so much of the Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew, released in 1940. Both Hitler and Goebbels believed the film to be a very potent tool for molding public opinion against Jews. The parallels between then and now are self-evident.’

it’s only a mystery because those who could talk, don’t want to be run over by the train, and those who know and can are disregarded. I think we are all familiar with a poignant instance of the latter. I think it has something to do with the BBC…

Thank you for this calm and rational rebuttal of the negative aspects of that article, Feinmann0.

What also could be mentioned is that Dr. James Cantor and his crew were subjected to a huge amount of criticism by many of their fellow MHPs due to their intention of adding hebephilia as a disorder to the DSM-5. There are many other prominent social scientists who have studied pedophilia and hebephilia in great depth, and who have come to considerably more nuanced and balanced conclusions that the largely (though admittedly, not entirely) politically and moralistically correct conclusions that Cantor did. This august list includes but is far from limited to Okami, Green, Franklin, Rind, Tromovich, Bauserman, Reigel, and Freimond. Yet none of their statements, conclusions, and concerns were cited.

It seems the authors of this article found a single source, and one consisting of one particular organization that has a very specific moralizing agenda as its ticket to win public attention and acceptance, an agenda not connected to actual science. Cantor is in a cozy position at his Canadian institute to be a very vocal mouthpiece for this topic within the mental health profession, but his words are hardly considered “law” in the greater MHP community and among social scientists in general who have studied this particular topic in-depth.

Further, those bits about the allegedly “different” morphology of the pedo brain have been cogently criticized and challenged by many of the same sources listed above, and this should have been noted by the authors of this article rather than simply spreading Cantor’s conclusions as gospel to the public. But since Cantor was the main professional source they consulted for this article rather than doing the necessary leg work to present a more balanced view culled by many noted professionals – including Cantor’s many Non-MAP critics in the social sciences field – the end result was lazy and didn’t present a full and accurate picture of this controversial topic. Still, the article was better than most other mainstream articles on the topic over the past 30 years. That is commendable, but still not saying much when you note the quality of comparisons available.

Since Cantor has become VirPed’s guru, why doesn’t he MRI-scan the members of that group? That would yield more reliable results than performing so-called scientific research on the scum that ended up in prison.

You may be thinking of Lot, the nephew of Abraham, who is effectively raped by his daughters while intoxicated in Genesis 19:30-36 (in their defence, Lot’s wife had been unexpectedly transformed into a table condiment and so rendered unable to perform her normal conjugal functions, Genesis 19:26). Abraham shags his maidservant Hagar in Genesis 16:2-4, but not drunkenly and with the full approval of his wife (who subsequently changes her mind, Genesis 21). It’s all quite a bodice-ripper, but I must defend the founder of modern monotheism against this particular accusation. Abraham didn’t even have any daughters, never mind do any shagging with them. .

Yes, I was thinking of Genesis 19, hence Lot. He had interesting mitigation, as you say, although I doubt it would play very well in the courts these days!

You correctly point out that Abraham didn’t have any daughters. But if he had had any I’m sure he would have shagged them. After all, when he had a son he didn’t exactly turn out to be the most restrained of fathers, did he?

“Why not sex, too? Society has already answered your question for you, forcefully but unspokenly. Learn the verbal answer below and see what you can do with the information. This popular meme just grows new heads no matter how often I cut off the old ones. If BC members want to live in mystery and dazed confusion about this topic forever, go ahead and discount me, believe the meme. What’s the topic? Power. Control. The Victorian cultural hammerlock that makes sex the antithesis of power.

In Anglo-Victorianism, sex is intrinsically a morally weakening force. Nudity as its immediate forerunner is also morally weakening by nature. (This isn’t my opinion; this is the opinion of the culture I grew up in.) Killing animals, on the other hand, as a part of world mastery, is a morally strengthening force. Therefore, it does no good at all to protest that you were more shocked by killing animals than by nudity. In Victorianism, that translates as “nudity weakened me to the point where I could no longer stomach the killing part of world mastery.” The writer thus labels himself, in Victorian terms, a moral degenerate of the worst kind, gravitating towards nudity, even for children, and shrinking from manly butchery.”

OK, so where I was living, we had the classic pattern of parents who were more culturally Muslim than devout, and daughters who upped and decided to wear the hijab one day. I got to know quite a few of the local kids aged 15-16, and I estimate that about one-fifth to one-quarter of the girls wore full Muslim dress, just with face uncovered. Of course, they had to unveil their hair as they went through the school gates.

Here’s the thing: the boys had two choices: act tough and macho, spit on the floor, skip school — or be a social reject. The girls had three: wear clothes you have to pour yourself into and a pound of makeup; wear the full Muslim dress — or be a social reject. I thought I understood at least some of the motives of at least some who were opting for Muslim dress. They weren’t ready to deal with sexual attention to their bodies and with the hostility that can go along with it and the slut-shaming or the prude-shaming. For the same reason, many non-Muslim girls that age wear baggy, figure-concealing clothes. Only this was a better option, because everyone respected the girls in Muslim dress. I never heard anybody laugh at them for what they were wearing.

The other thing is that Islam was important to these kids, including the ones in the skintight jeans. The only intellectual subject I ever heard them discuss was Islamic theology (not to a very high level, granted); the only books I ever saw any of them willingly read were pamphlets on Islam. The schools weren’t doing all that well by them. The local place was a huge grey prison with thirty-five to a class. One of the teachers there told me that they couldn’t confiscate cellphones because the kids would refuse to surrender them, so many kids spent entire classes surfing the Internet. He also said that kids would wander the halls and show up in classrooms that they didn’t belong in, just for kicks. There were no Arabic for Arabic speakers classes, damn it. Here were kids who had the enormous gift of growing up bilingual in Arabic and French and the school was making no effort to harness this in the interests of integration and of education. The kids were left, by and large, able to speak only dialectal Arabic and not able to read or write Arabic. I said to the teacher that this was a terrible shame and he said that Arabic might damage the kids’ French; my protestations that this is not how it works fell on deaf ears. Frankly, some French people have a bit of an unscientific mentality: you can still find plenty of shrinks there who think autism is caused by a ‘refrigerator mother’, for instance. It has something to do with respect for high culture, which is of course a good thing, and something to do with academic specialisation done too soon, too narrowly, so that people who’ve done a literary course of studies emerge able to scan a line of verse just from hearing it (I have to count on my fingers) but not able to evaluate data and weigh evidence very well.

Anyway, the kids: at school they were fed Voltaire. They did not care about Voltaire. There were enormous gaps in their general knowledge. One told me aeroplanes were invented around 1500; another, looking at a photo of a violin and one of a flute, did not know which was which. These were 15-16 year olds, remember. Most of the public transport didn’t run to their part of the city, so many of them had never been downtown. They all wanted to get out and go somewhere else: Las Vegas, Miami, that kind of thing. Most of them, by that age, knew the score. They knew they were getting the short end of the stick. I worried more about the boys than about the girls. The girls were going to do a social services Bac, pass it if perhaps only on the second go-round, and get steady, decently-paid pink-collar jobs. The boys were going to become long-term unemployed, like their parents, because manufacturing in the area died out in the 1980s or so. The girls were going to be the chief breadwinners for their families. I’ve seen this happen among Latin@s in the US as well, and it seems to me that men from a culture with strongly delineated gender roles tend to mind less if their wives are bringing home most of the bacon, because they have plenty of other opportunities to perform masculinity right. Or perhaps that only applies if they are outside their home culture, I don’t know.

So Islam mattered to these kids as a way to establish their identity, to explore ideas, to feel virtuous and proud, and to flip the bird at authority – because of course they knew that the whole being-a-religious-Muslim thing is not looked on kindly by the French state. It offered them things they weren’t getting elsewhere. That being said, I highly doubted we had any budding terrorists in the neighbourhood. Hegemonic culture takes over like nobody’s business. Kids in the US who lived in Central America till they were eight or nine, whose entire families are Central American, who attend majority Central American schools and take Spanish for Spanish speakers there, will still speak English with their brothers and sisters and classmates, using Spanish only with their older family members. These kids of Maghrebian parents adored US pop culture: Rihanna, Wizards of Waverly Place, Call of Duty 3. The US pop culture occupied significantly more mental space than Islam and it would always win over Islam, hands down.

I’m no fan of islamic fundamentalism, but I’ve always thought the French government’s ban on islamic dress in public was heavy-handed. And perhaps counter-productive too–once adolescents get the idea that something is ‘required’ of them, they have a strong tendency to do the opposite!

Islamic dress is not forbidden in French public places, the burka is. Calling that heavy-handed seems pretty heavy-handed to me. In the same way, I totally disagree with A. who leads people who don’t live in France to believe that arab youths in France are castaways nobody gives a damn about. Of course, all of them won’t become terrorists or delinquents but the problems caused by an active minority amongst them are serious enough and should not be blamed on intolerance or apartheid.

Yes. As I say, I used to see the girls uncovering their hair as they walked in. One boy went round gleefully telling everyone how one day he’d worn a huge crucifix to school see if the teachers would tell him to take it off, the idea being that if they didn’t, this would be proof that they were discriminating against Muslims. Of course they did tell him to take it off.

I certainly wouldn’t say they are castaways. I was simply quite struck by the gaps in their general knowledge, the problems I heard about at the school and the lack of employment prospects for the boys especially. I’m sure you can find plenty of non-Arab youths with the same problems, but where I was living, there were hardly any non-Arab youths, except for a sprinking of Comorians. And yes, where I was living there were gangs, but I never (knowingly) came across any gang members, so I have no idea who they were.

Would be fascinated to read your thoughts on the situation in France. I used to live in an area that was solidly Maghrebian immigrants and their kids and the stuff about the headscarves and acceptance of French culture…it ain’t quite like they say.

The family-staged the kidnapping of their own 6-year-old is clearly despicable, but I tend to think losing custody of the child would not be justice (unless I guess he consistently says he wants to live somewhere else). I have the feeling that it’s pretty frequent that parents scare the shit out of their kids and briefly restrain them. It would be great if that sort of thing would stop, but it seems unrealistic to tear apart every family it occurs in. This case is sensational, but I’m not sure the actual harm or intent of harm rises above a pretty common form of abuse.

I also don’t see why it qualifies as kidnapping, if the guardians had arranged for him to be picked up by this guy, any more than if I arrange for someone to pick up my kid to bring him home.

Note that he’s studying children “on the margin of placement”. Obviously kids need to be removed from a home in which they are not fed, or are beaten black and blue every Saturday.

This UK study is also interesting, though its in-depth interviews look only at the worst piece of the situation: those adoptions which were either disrupted/dissolved or in which the adoptive parents were finding parenting “very challenging”. If an adoptive family were happy and doing well together, they weren’t interviewed. But the bit most relevant to what I said above is that the likelihood of disruption/dissolution increases with the child’s age at time of placement.

My question regarding where, or under what circumstances, the child is better off, is this: How does the child feel about being in the “custody” (read: control) of his parents? Would he rather be elsewhere? How he feels about where he lives, and the situation in general, should mean quite a lot, IMO. But I see this question absent in so many discussions of the topic at hand.

Absolutely. I was argued over in court when I was six (not a straight custody case but it boiled down to something similar) and I was furious at not being consulted. The way I put it was, “I feel like a sack of potatoes” — i.e. I feel that I am being treated like an inanimate object, not a person with opinions and a will. For some years afterwards I would fly off the handle if anyone said the word ‘custody’: “You take prisoners into custody!”